Improving Teaching News - 2016

Several years ago, many of us in the Teaching & Learning Laboratory (TLL) began to think about ways to more effectively share our work. We discussed blogs, tweets, and a variety of other forms of social media, but we never achieved much traction or consensus. Fortunately, some of our ideas persisted and took shape and now are bearing fruit.

Improving educational delivery is a core focus of MIT, and also a priority for training new generations of teachers in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering (CEE). On July 19, about 30 postdocs and graduate students attended a Workshop on Digital Education hosted by CEE to learn about digital education tools available to them as they prepare to teach undergraduate and graduate students, both at MIT and elsewhere.

Awards honor faculty and instructors who have effectively leveraged digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT.

This year marks the launch of the MIT Teaching with Digital Technology Awards. Co-sponsored by the Office of Digital Learning (ODL), the Dean of Undergraduate Education (DUE) and the Office of the Dean for Graduate Education (ODGE), the student-nominated awards recognize faculty and instructors who have effectively leveraged digital technology to improve teaching and learning at MIT. The winners are:

MacVicar Day symposium features a sampling of innovative pedagogical practices and lessons learned.

At the MacVicar Day symposium on March 11, Catherine Drennan shared a conundrum she encountered in her first job as a high school chemistry teacher: Her students didn’t seem to grasp how the chemical principles they were learning in the classroom could be applied in the real world.

MIT President L. Rafael Reif announced today a significant expansion of the Institute’s programs in learning research and online and digital education — from pre-kindergarten through residential higher education and lifelong learning — that fulfills a number of recommendations made in 2014 by the Institute-Wide Task Force on the Future of MIT Education.